The flesh wounds inflicted on American national amour propre by Frances Trollope's best-selling book, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, were superficial compared with the deep punctures made by Charles Dickens's American Notes. They were the more painful and harder to heal because by the date of his journey in 1842, Dickens was treated as something of a god on earth by his huge American reading public. His novels were instantaneous best sellers; and many of them - especially Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist - had been dramatised for the popular stage. So the shock of their favourite literary lion biting America, and biting hard, was almost a cultural trauma. Yet despite - or because - of the unhappiness it engendered, the Notes sold 50,000 copies in two days in the US.

Dickens's America, his Great Expectorations, is all Yankee repression and southern stupor. Drawn by instinct and sympathy to the underdog and the underworld, Dickens sees Boston, New York and Philadelphia through the keyhole of the prison cell and the madhouse. The Tombs in New York served him as a metaphor for the dark unforgiving world in which it was situated, just as the slaughterhouses of Chicago would serve the next generation as the emblem of carnivorous, sanguine America. And when the United States was not a house of detention or an asylum, or the reeking warrens of the Five Points, where the pigs (again) knew their way about the alleys, it was, in its very heart a river of death. Decades before Joseph Conrad steamed his way upstream into the heart of imperial darkness, Dickens experienced the Mississippi as a septic ooze: the three-mile wide "ditch", a turbid soup of animal and vegetable muck washing against the languid paddles, a vector of sickness and servitude. Cairo, Illinois, lay in the stinking belly of the beast: "The hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster, hideous to behold, a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any promise, a place without one single quality in earth air and water to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo."

The sense of America as a sink of contamination extended to its society and institutions. In the Capitol, Dickens saw "the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought", a clamorous gang of fakes, fools and tricksters. Parliamentary procedure left something to be desired. "It was not a month since this... body had sat calmly by and heard, a man one of themselves, with oaths which beggars in their drink reject, threatening to cut another's throat from ear to ear." "Did I see among them, the intelligence and refinement, the true, honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there were drops of blood and life but they scarcely coloured the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and pay."

And yet for someone so exercised by injustice, Dickens maintained a strangely ambiguous attitude to slavery, especially during the Civil war. He had lit into the atrocity in American Notes, dividing slave-owners into those who "are moderate and rational owners of human cattle" and others, who "until the bloody chapter has a bloody end... would... gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the right to perpetuate slavery and to whip and work and torture slaves unquestioned by human authority." Yet when that war actually came, like so many other French and British who had visited the States, he denied that slavery had anything to do with the causes of the conflict. Instead, he signed on to the rationalisation given by the Confederacy for its secession that it was a war fought for states' rights, and continued to believe the war had been provoked by a relentless Yankee design to im-pose its will to dominate the Union. The north, he wrote to a friend, hates the Negro quite as heartily as the south, but uses slavery as a pretext for its domination. Nor until almost the very end did he think the Union would prevail. Lincoln he wrote off as a homespun Machiavelli, and only warmed to him after the assassination.

But Dickens's cynicism about the war was shared by many on both sides of the English channel. Frances Trollope's son Anthony, visiting the Union army in 1862, was touched by the patient stoicism of the troops but unpersuaded of their fitness for the task. "I found that the more I saw of them the more I lost that respect for them I once had felt. I think it was their dirt that chiefly operated upon me." More seriously, despite the fact that abolitionism was an impassioned force in some parts of middle-class Victorian England, only one of the leaders of the Liberal party, John Bright, was an out-and-out supporter of the cause. By far the majority of the higher governing circles of both Britain and France was decisively more sympathetic to the south, not only because of the threatened interruption of raw cotton supplies, but also because a Confederate victory would pre-empt the emergence of an immense continental giant, about whose economic and territorial power the European states were becoming increasingly nervous.

When, in November 1861, an American warship stopped the British vessel Trent on the high seas to remove the Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell, bound respectively for London and Paris, the indignity brought Britain and the Union government to the brink of war. It took the ailing Prince Albert's intervention to dissuade the British government from declaring war. According to Philippe Roger, whose L'Ennemi américain is a brilliant and exhaustive guide to the long, depressing history of French Ameriphobia, the fate of the south became a sentimental fashion in Napoleon III's Paris: the only obstacle to the otherwise relentless advance of the Anglo-Yankee machine-state juggernaut.

When the eagerly expected crack-up of the republic failed to materialise, the angst about its economic transformation and territorial expansion ripened into a roaring neurosis. For some time the British government, equally worried about the growing imperial rivalry of the new Germany and the French Republic, complacently assumed that American expansionism could be manipulated to keep its European rivals at bay. If the American fleet would, for its own purposes, keep European undesirables out of the Pacific at no cost to the British taxpayer, jolly good for the stars and stripes. So Admiral Mahan, the booster of America's naval armaments, found a receptive audience in Whitehall. The Spanish-American war of 1898, which the French treated as the un-masking of the monstrosity that was Yankee imperialism, was looked at in London with relaxed tolerance. Rudyard Kipling's lines on "the white man's burden" were written, not in praise of some triumph of the union jack beneath far-flung palm and pine, but to celebrate the fall of Manila.

Much as he loved the mile-high energy of America, Kipling, who shipped from India to California in 1889, became progressively unhappier the further east he travelled. While he rode the cable-car the exhilaration of San Francisco, Chicago - soot-black, fog-fouled, with its scummy river speckled with rust and grease, a place marked in European writing by the Haymarket riots of 1882 as a theatre of class violence - was, he thought, the true apparition of the American future. At the stockyards Kipling stood on a narrow beam looking down on the "railway of death", which carried squealing hogs, tied by their hinders, to their appointment with the two lines of butchers. "There awaited them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats and the full-voiced shriek became a sputter and then a fall as of heavy tropical rain... they were excessively alive these pigs. And then they were so excessively dead and the man in the drippy, clammy, hot passage did not seem to care."

That the stockyards were also a tourist attraction, complete with chirpy guides, only heightened Kipling's stupefaction. Unforgettably, he saw "a young woman of large mould, with brilliantly scarlet lips and heavy eyebrows... dressed in flaming red and black and her feet... were cased in red leather shoes. She stood in a patch of sunlight, the red blood under her shoes, the vivid carcasses tacked round her, a bullock bleeding its life away not six feet away from her and the death factory roaring all round her. She looked curiously with hard bold eyes and was not ashamed."

Like all the most accomplished writing about 19th-century America, it is hard to know where fact ends and fiction begins in Kipling's American Notes. But the bravura passages of his book certainly establish what would be the sovereign idées fixes of Europeans encountering the muscular republic on the verge of its imperial awakening. Admiral Mahan's and Teddy Roosevelt's America was seen as awesomely carnivorous, racially mongrel and socially polarised, both ethically primitive and technologically advanced; an immense, grinding operation, machine-tooled for profits and slaughter.

That stereotype, along with America's cultural poverty (exceptions were always made for Poe and Mark Twain) imprinted itself in the literature of reporters from the old world at the turn of the century. Wherever they looked, even in the most apparently innocent rituals of American life, they saw the modernisation of barbarism. In an age over-absorbed by the physiology of national types, homo Americanus seemed to have evolved for the maximisation of physical force. The men were big and meaty; the women hardly less so. The amount of food they packed away was truly frightening. And while the habit of chewing gum was preferable to tobacco, its ubiquitousness mystified French observers like Jules Huret until he decided it was a work-out for the over-evolved Yankee jaws and teeth, which, like the rest of their anatomy, could not tolerate stillness and needed all the power they could get to tear their way through the slabs of beefsteaks, consumed at breakfast as well as dinner.

Likewise the appeal of American football, usually viewed at the Harvard-Yale game, which became almost as much a fixture of itineraries as the stockyards, and which seemed to put a premium on graceless violence that was only explicable as a quasi-Spartan military training. Its emphasis on body-slamming collisions seemed bad enough but what really appalled Europeans was the blood-lust it seemed to provoke in spectators. At one Harvard-Yale game, Huret listened in appalled fascination as a19-year-old yelled "Kill him" and "Break his neck" from the bleachers.

Still more shocking to Gallic assumptions of femininity were the cheer-leaders, whom Georges Duhamel pictured as Bacchae in lipstick, their "... skirts flying in the wind... screaming and flouncing around, showing their haunches and... performing a suggestive belly dance like the dances of the prostitutes of the Mediterranean ports". Duhamel's equally terrifying (though not unarousing) experience of being driven at 50 miles an hour by a woman working the pedals with her long silk-stockinged legs while smoking a cigarette, made it clear to him, as to countless other French commentators, that America had become a "gynocracy" where smart women lorded it over pallid men emasculated by their obligation to make the fortunes that alone could satisfy their wives.

One might at least suppose that the Allies would be grateful for the mobilisation of American man-power when, in 1917, it tipped the balance against the Germans and Austrians. "Lafayette, we're here," the much-quoted declaration of General Stanton, not to mention the sacrifice of American lives for a European cause, seemed to herald a restored era of transatlantic good feelings. But as Philippe Roger made clear, if the war cre ated a brief solidarity, the peace more decisively destroyed it. When Woodrow Wilson failed to persuade Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and America withdrew again into isolationist self-interest, all the old insecurities and animosities returned with redoubled bitterness. Wilson himself was perhaps the most detested of all American presi-dents in France, his unctuous self-righteousness compounded by the egregious failure to deliver results. From Lloyd George and Clemenceau down to the critics on the streetcar, Wilson was seen as an all-American humbug, forever preaching to the Europeans while practising the politics of national egotism.

When the magnitude of French and British indebtedness to the US became clear, American considerateness (as the French saw it) towards German reparation schedules fed into the poisoned brew of conspiracy theories that seethed and bubbled in the anti-American press in the 1920s and early 30s. In The American Cancer, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu went so far as to argue that the first world war had been a plot hatched by American high finance to ensnare Europe in a web of permanent debt, a view echoed in J-L Chastanet's Uncle Shylock and in Charles Pomaret's America's Conquest of Europe. The newspaper France-Soir calculated the weight of debt at 7,200 francs for every French man and woman. Nor was there much sentimental gratitude for General Pershing's doughboys. Why, it was asked, had the engagement of American troops on the Western Front been delayed until 1918, when their active deployment a few months earlier might have significantly reduced Allied losses? The answer was that the US had waited until it could mobilise a force large enough, not just to win the war, but to dominate the peace.

For French writers like Kadmi-Cohen, author of The American Abomination, the threat from the US was not just economic or military. It now posed a social and cultural threat to the civilisation of Europe. Leading French writers - André Siegfried, André Tardieu and Georges Duhamel - entered the fray against the beast, convinced that the defence of humane culture demanded no less.

The greatest of the "American perils" (a phrase that had become a commonplace in this literature) was the standardisation of social life (the ancestor of today's complaints against globalisation); the thinning of the richness of human habit to the point where those habits could be marketable, not only inside America, but because of the global reach of American capitalism, to the entire world. Hollywood movies, according to Duhamel, "a pastime for slaves, an amusement of the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety", were the Trojan horse for the Americanisation of the world. But the lament of Duhamel and others went well beyond a call to man the barricades of high culture against the oncoming barbarians from the west. It sounded the tocsin about the corruption of diet and dress by mass-produced dross; the cultural catastrophe that awaited Europe should the miserable alienation and uniformity of American culture be exported across the Atlantic. Jean Baudrillard's belief that the defining characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality, was anticipated by Duhamel's polemics against the "shadow world" of the movies with their reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark. After the second world war, Simone de Beauvoir made what she thought was a telling contrast between the richness of old-world social experience and the thinness of the American equivalent by comparing a game of petanque with candlepin-bowling. Boules, old style, was played beneath an avenue of leafy plane trees in some village square and incorporated the natural unevenness - the bumps and hollows of the playing ground - into the skill of the game. The American pastime, on the other hand, had reduced bowling to a soulless indoor exercise where machines, not men, retrieved balls, and where the balls themselves were rolled on surfaces of mercilessly honed smoothness.

The charge that America was imposing its synthetic third-rate cultural habits on the prostrate body of mangled, bankrupt, war-torn Europe returned with even more force after 1945. Where Americans thought of the Marshall plan (together with the forgiveness of French debts) as an exercise in wise altruism, European leaders like De Gaulle still bristled with suspicion at the patronising weight of the "MP". Complaints against Coca-Colonisation, the mantra of the anti-globalisers, were already in full cry in the 1950s. But as Arthur Koestler put it in 1951, though he bowed to no-one in his loathing of "cellophane-wrapped bread, processed towns of cement and glass... crooners and swooners... the Organisation Man and the Readers' Digest... who coerced us into buying all this? The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium war to force their revolting 'Coke' down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because Europe wanted it..."

Yet somehow in the present crisis American democracy has let itself be represented as American despotism. Many in the European anti-war movement see the whole bundle of American values - consumer capitalism, the free market in information, an open electoral system - as a way of life which Americans impose on, rather than offer to, other cultures. In the most extreme polemics American freedom is itself a disingenuous fraud, coercion with a smiley face; Harold Pinter's "monster out of control". Some of this demonisation is the purest casuistry. At the very moment when representa-tives of the Iraqi exile community were recounting stories of the unspeakable atrocities they had endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein, banners in the hands of the usual suspects were proclaiming an equation between the stars and stripes and the swastika.

Not all of these cavils are necessarily false, of course, just because they get uttered by hard-core Ameriphobes for whom the United States has always been the evil empire. Historically, Americans have valued haste over rumination. Fast-food nation was invented in the 1830s, and Captain Hall's puzzled observation that the word "improvement" in America seemed to mean "an augmentation in the number of houses and people and above all in the amount of cleared land", has not lost any of its validity with the passing of a 170-odd years. Early on, Europeans identified appetite and impatience as the cardinal American sins. Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the almost frantic hurry with which Americans had to get somewhere, never mind where; and their short fuse when anything impeded the path of their route.

American public support for the war with Iraq - more fragile than is often represented in the European press - has depended critically on unexamined assumptions that it will be a matter of mere weeks. Nothing perhaps is more unconscionable in the Bush administration's presentation of what lies ahead than its reluctance to broach the painful truth that what lies ahead will be much more testing than a fly-by war and a drive-through peace.

And yet it is cant rather than calculation that has most contributed to the sudden widening of the Atlantic. While complaints about national egocentricity sound a bit rich coming as they do from the French and their foreign minister, who professes himself a fan of that exemplary multilateralist, Napoleon Bonaparte, it seems borne out by every screw-them aside uttered by the imperturbably affable Mr Rumsfeld. Knut Hamsun put the unapologetic celebration of separateness down to a lack of education or even curiosity about other places and cultures, and commented, perhaps waspishly, "it is incredible how hard America works at being a world of its own in the world".

Virtuous isolation, of course, wasn't a problem as long as the US saw the exercise of its power primarily in terms of the defensive policing of its own continental space. But now that policing has gone irreversibly global, the imperious insistence on the American way or else has only a limited usefulness in any long-term pacification strategy. Like it or not, help will be needed, especially given America's notoriously short attention span, intolerance of casualties and grievously wounded prosperity. Serving the United Nations with notices of imminent redundancy should its policies not replicate those of the US and the UK might turn out to be short-sighted since in Europe, even in those countries whose governments have aligned themselves with America, there was almost no support for war without UN sanction.

Perhaps Mrs Trollope put it best after all: "If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, sorry, stubborn persuasion that they are the first and best of the human race, and that nothing is to be learned but what they are able to teach and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess."